Bangalore based Financial-Technology platform ClearTax, providing solutions for Income Tax filing, GST and Mutual Fund Investments, along with Western India Regional Council of Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) successfully concluded a two-day Sub Regional conference covering GSTR-9 filing and Audit for CAs on 8th and 9th November 2019 at Vivanta by Taj in Goa, to help CAs file GSTR-9 in a convenient manner and also to educate them on the transition from Old to New GST returns system.

ClearTax used this platform to create awareness about the concerns and challenges faced by majority of filers in GSTR-9 and explained about appropriate solutions from ClearTax to counter such challenges.

GSTR 9 is an annual return to be filed yearly by taxpayers registered under GST. This return is applicable for all businesses that fall under the GST regime with few exceptions thus impacting over 8 Mn businesses in the country. GSTR-9 form is an aggregated summary of all GST returns from July 2017 to March 2018 including amendments and supplier invoices which could be entered till March 2019. Businesses are expected to correctly match all 21 months of GST data with their accounting books, identify mismatches and file GSTR-9 accordingly. With the annual return filing deadline around the corner – 30th November 2019, all businesses and CAs are scrambling to match their data and prepare the return, the problem is compounded as the size of business grows and enterprises are struggling to manage the entire process. Also, once filed, it cannot be revised and that’s a major problem which the community is facing.

Archit Gupta, Founder & CEO, ClearTax, said, “Our industry is undergoing rapid transformation with the overall GST roadmap, CAs find it challenging to understand and implement GST and adapt to them quickly. Instead of letting that be a barrier to their business, we are utilizing platforms like this where we can establish connect with the CA community to get to the bottom of the scenario and educate the CAs to do their GSTR-9 filing in a hassle-free way and make compliance easy. We are overwhelmed with the response and it has proved beneficial.”

The in-depth GST conference was attended by over 200 CAs across India. The conference garnered good response from the participants who had doubts on various aspects of present GST returns systems and changes required in the new GST system.

ClearTax has a range of end-to-end solutions for businesses and individuals to make their GST compliance easier. ClearTax has specialized software which understands the GST law and is updated with all the recent developments in terms of compliance regulations. The software uses intelligent algorithms that deploy machine learning to match invoices to relevant entries.

Cleartax’s GSTR-9 solution automates this entire process by auto-calculating almost the entire form. A comprehensive checklist that smartly identifies issues with the return and alerts the user so that errors are avoided while filing. Cleartax also solves core issues faced by users. All GST data for 21 months is available with a single click and matching of GSTR-1, GSTR 2A, GSTR-3B with each other and accounting books is built in. Importantly, Cleartax’s GSTR-9 solution allows the user to audit the government auto-filled values in GSTR-9 form and trace them across individual months and down to the relevant invoices. The entire user interface is on the cloud thereby making it very easy to get started and has an excel like interface.